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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#291

Post by wly_cdgr »

The author has a responsibility to out the cheaters. It's unacceptably unfair to the students in his course who didn't cheat, and cheaters should be shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely damaged. I really don't give a shit what excuses or justifications someone might have had for cheating, if you had to run away from home sleep under the bridge and suck dick for wifi after your dad killed your mom or whatever. I literally do not give one flying fuck. Cheating is not acceptable or excusable, ever, period.

I'll go further and say that if you're not ready to out cheaters in your classes, you have no business teaching

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#292

Post by mightybyte »

jmull wrote: post #64

I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…

I completely agree with this view. However, I think it's worth trying hard to give the students the benefit of the doubt and ask how cheating might be rational. In other words, flip the assumptions and ask why we would require them to study something that they are just going to cheat at.

Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?

The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#294

Post by User23 »

alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had.

None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#295

Post by headsoup »

ikt wrote: post #280
medler wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It’s not surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely successful in his time, but he wasn’t a prodigy either.

So by and by you're saying something like Cardano is definitely not a ponzi because it's extremely focused on doing everything academically? https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-p... If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything about making themselves richer at the e…

That wouldn't be a 'billion dollar'+ cryptocurrency though would it

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#296

Post by BonoboIO »

kstenerud wrote: post #242

Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class. This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well. Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pas…

Great summary. Might have to save this.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#298

Post by gravypod »

pugets wrote: post #16
nr2x wrote: post #5

Exams are the mark of a lazy instructor who doesn’t want to design appropriately challenging assignments, as the author says: “I hadn’t fully prepped the class”.

What appropriately challenging cheat-proof calculus assignment could you give to a classroom of 100 undergrads? As soon as those questions leave the classroom, they will be passed around in group chats. That’s why exams remain relevant. If a student averages 95% on their assignments, but shows up to the exam and can’t solve ∫sin x dx like they had supposedly done a hundred times on their own, then they’re probably ch…

If you are teaching something you're probably teaching it for >10 years. If every year you create 20 multi-part questions ("We have a factory producing boxes, what's the optimal size of box for X when Y"). You can then distribute a random question to every student in a similar bin of grade distribution. If a group of people are cheating they'll likely be in the same grade bin so this makes sure each cheater doesn't see the questions everyone else does.

You repeat this process every year for 10 years and now you have 200 questions. The next professor comes in and does the same but now also has 200 questions + answer guides.

With some basic programming you could make it automatically change the numbers (to "friendly" numbers that break up into round numbers) and have an infinite pool of challenging quiz, midterm, and final questions. If everyone gets different questions they cannot cheat by sharing answers. Only by sharing approach.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#299

Post by User23 »

kstenerud wrote: post #242

Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class. This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well. Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pas…

> This has been going on for decades in Asia

I’m no sinologist, but isn’t this off by at least an order of magnitude if not two? The imperial civil service exam is famous after all and the Chinese culture is millennia ancient. The incentives for cheating have been around for a very long time.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#300

Post by onetimeusename »

jl2718 wrote: post #279
onetimeusename wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but…

Tests always get leaked somehow. The students that were hit by the curve were, like me in school, struggling honestly toward the middle. That method is probably not as good at knowledge acquisition as the various methods of cheating, but hopefully better at flexible problem solving. I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter; the curve proba…

>I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter

you may be on to something with this one

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